I love hats. That is, I love Hat People. The first time I ever got on a plane and went anywhere, I flew to New York to play a gig with my band. We giggled our way into a yellow cab and out into the city at dawn. It felt like being poured directly through the cinema screen into Breakfast at Tiffany's.

As our taxi pulled up to the first light we hit in Manhattan, the steam was rising from the subway, lit by lemonade sunshine. Right beside us, leaning lightly against a bollard on the sidewalk, was Quentin Crisp. As always, he was wearing the most perfect hat, which you can see for yourself on the cover of his 1985 book Manners From Heaven: A Divine Guide to Good Behaviour. That fleeting moment taught me a lot – even more than Anita Cocktail (the drag queen hostess who demonstrated fouettés en tournant on the dance floor of Lucky Cheng's nightclub 16 hours later).

Among other things, it taught me that hats are –metaphorically as well as literally – the pinnacle of style. And that they should only be attempted by Hat People. Humphrey Bogart, Sophia Loren, Hunter S Thompson, Lady Gaga, Columbo… Hat People. The relationship between the titfer and the head it tops is symbiotic. You have to mean the hat for it to work. I mention this because hats are huge this autumn – literally in the case of Marc Jacobs' and Louis Vuitton's gigantic numbers.

The A/W shows also offered knitted owls at Anna Sui, tweed baker boys at Burberry and low-peaked caps everywhere from Cavalli to Topshop Unique. If you can carry one off, you're in luck.

Alas, I am yet to become a Hat Person. I came close recently, when my one-year-old placed a Thomas the Tank Engine with mechanised wheels on my forehead just before a live TV broadcast. Within seconds, it became so tangled in my hair that I believed I would have to style it out, passing Thomas off as a conceptual headpiece. Luckily, we managed to extract him. Probably for the best, you can't force these things – a person's aesthetic comes from within.

In the words of Quentin Crisp: "Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are." I'm almost a Hat Person.How about you?